Worried about education? Get stuck in and change it

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/17/worried-education-schools-policy

Version 0 of 1.

“It’s time to stop schools failing our children,” wrote the education secretary in the Sunday Telegraph; and what better way to do so than to sack the headteacher, as she suggests? There is no working definition of what Nicky Morgan calls a “‘coasting’ school”, nor any obvious stream of heads who can replace the ones she plans to kick out.

Morgan herself famously asked teachers during the last government whether they were overworked and, if so, why. The answer came back (I precis): we are stretched to translucency by your stupid policies. Depressing trends already observable in teaching – where highly trained, passionate people spend more time proving to Ofsted that they’re doing their job, than they spend actually doing it – are expected to extend into headship, with endless hoops to jump through to avoid a judgment that nobody really knows the meaning of in the first place.

The government’s determination to blame schools for every poor outcome has reached the point of neurosis. You would be hard pushed to find people more committed to equality of opportunity than teachers and heads, who put up with ever greater workloads and infantilising government surveillance in order to foster it. But their role in children’s lives, while huge in terms of influence, is small in terms of time: children spend only 12% of their waking hours at school.

Become a governor of an academy. Uphold the values you love in community schools: that they serve the whole community

The benefits gleaned by having breakfast clubs and free school meals cannot counteract the effects of growing up in a household that can’t predictably put food on the table. It is just unthinking Victorian sentimentalism to suppose that it can. Schools can often acutely recognise the problems caused by hardship, but they do not have a hope of solving them.

This policy is a piece of post-election spin; now that teachers no longer need to be courted or pandered to for the possibility of votes, they can be demonised from the bottom to the top. As crises arise – as they inevitably will, with schools facing cuts of up to 12% in real-terms funding – the discursive ground will have been laid already for the government to act as a correcting authority over the feckless, lazy teaching profession. This is shameless and laughable, but it just might work for the media’s nanosecond attention span.

On the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday morning, Morgan elaborated on her vision. “We can see in the results,” she said, “that students do do better in academies, at Key Stage 2 and at GCSEs.”

This is exactly what we cannot see. The education select committee explicitly said four months ago that “current evidence does not allow us to draw conclusions on whether academies in themselves are a positive force for change”. The same minister told the same programme back in February that her government had “introduced the phonics check for six-year-olds, and 100,000 more young people are able to read better as a result.” Academies run the same gamut from good to bad as local authority schools do. Children’s reading is not improved by testing. She’s talking nonsense and she knows it.

But here, we all need to change tack – and by “all”, I don’t mean progressives, I don’t even mean people who can’t stand conservatives, I mean the broadest possible coalition of people who don’t wish to be lied to and manipulated by their political culture, people who want to see their public service workers treated with respect.

Since 2010, the debates about government strategy, from education into health, social security and beyond, have unfolded like this. The facts are casually and deliberately misrepresented, while the opinions of the professionals are undermined by preemptive trashing. A particular kind of discussion emerges: it is laden with misinformation that takes a lot of careful debunking.

Related: We do everything to escape the rat race. Then we inflict it on our kids | Gaby Hinsliff

It’s boring to do and boring to watch; it is sour and embittered before it even begins. Nobody whose livelihood or family didn’t depend on it would wander anywhere near such vexed territory, and so it recedes from the public realm, to blow up again only when a disaster befalls it (cementing the view that the whole business – whatever it was – was just a Titanic waiting for an iceberg from the get-go). We need to get a lot smarter about responding.

If you think academies are a red herring, a partial and inconsistent solution to a problem that has been wrongly framed, then you need to somehow respond to this; choose a school that is still local authority-controlled, and support it to stay that way. Or become a governor of an academy, to uphold the values that you loved in community schools: that they serve the whole community.

If you think free schools are an open door to fraud and related-party transactions, if you think they invite faith-based fanaticism, or know that they find ways to exclude pupils who might bring down results, consider what kind of school you’d want. It might be a co-op school, or a citizen school. The Conservative manifesto pledged 500 free schools. What is to stop any of us using that promise against them, to build progressive, inclusive, ambitious institutions? When I say “you”, of course I’m talking to myself. This government isn’t going anywhere; I cannot spend another five years just goggling at its dishonesty. We need to find ways to build without them.